Understanding Immature Adults and Ways to Handle Them

For many reasons, some adults don’t grow up. Emotionally stuck at ages 5, 8, 14, 16 … they live in a world of dependency, social anxiety, lack of boundaries, and/or low self-esteem. In the most extreme cases, these overgrown Peter Pans reject the idea of sticking their neck out and taking a stab at much of anything …. life experiences such as higher education, career training, or having a serious cause or career, have been dismissed as not in the cards for them; they’ve concluded that if they tried anything of substance, they would fail. Those who do work often have had the job delivered to them via a helpful relative or friend, and there they will stay until hell freezes over. Their idea of the perfect life is never making themselves uncomfortable.

Almost always there is an enabling factor, someone who provides sustenance, shelter, and sometimes, coddling. Just like a crutch used to help a person with a bum leg walk, their assistance allows the emotionally immature person to survive without growing up. Ironically, the enabler is an emotionally immature person as well, just in different ways.

In Pia Mellody’s book Facing Codependence, an owner’s (1) manual for every person with childhood developmental trauma (CDT), which is virtually all of us, she explains that because of things that happened and didn’t happen in childhood, we become stunted at an emotionally young age. It is frighteningly easy for a child to be traumatized, even by little things that, to an outside observer, would not look traumatizing. This is why most of us have thousands of trauma wounds over the course of our childhoods.

The way an emotionally immature adult acts today can help us know at what age they are stuck, obviously, some end up more functional than others. For example, black and white thinkers are stunted at around age 9, before they reached the abstract thinking stage, which happens at around age 11. Children need to meet certain developmental goals throughout their young lives so that when they reach the age to launch, they will have the will, drive, and motivation to do so. Some people with CDT have enough drive to go to college and have a career but their emotional development in…